Semi-Official 7.x Suggestion Thread

[ChildServices]

World gen setting that lets you force all or a percentage of RNG-spawned NPRs to be Human.

[Tree]

World gen setting that lets you force all or a percentage of RNG-spawned NPRs to be Human.

Steve already mentioned adding a "lost colonies" setting allowing you to find NPRs of the race you're playing.

[ryuga81]

There are very few techs in Biology, so it wouldn't be bad if we had some kind of "medical tech" that improves lifespan of leaders/officers. At this point they retire quite early (~62 years), I'd expect 20 or 50 years into future people would remain active for longer.

It would be great if we could extend that by a year or two per tech level.

[ChildServices]

In the very least, we should have techs to expand the lifespans of our highest officer tiers.

[Silvarelion]

It would be lovely if box launchers would default to the level 1 reload rate to save costs on a tech with no benefit to the system.

[ChildServices]

Organising your salvos isn't too hard. In large battles, though, it can get difficult to make sense of what you've actually done to your enemy's ships. I'd like it if the game tracked exactly how much of your ordnance (maybe even down to numbers of specific missile types and their warhead values) that an enemy contact has been hit with and how much energy weapons fire (in damage points) that it has received.  It'd be great if, ontop of this, your intelligence information included a statistic for each enemy ship type's "average damage before kill" that becomes more precise as you kill more of them.

[smoelf]

Being able to search for minerals based on a set number of jumps from a selected system.

Right now you can search for e.g. Duranium in either all surveyed systems or a single system. It would be awesome if you could select a system, like Sol, and search for e.g. Duaranium in systems one jump away from Sol or two jumps away from Sol. Would be really helpful when establishing colonies in deep space, and you want to ensure access to all minerals within a reasonable distance.

[alex_brunius]

Being able to search for minerals based on a set number of jumps from a selected system.

Right now you can search for e.g. Duranium in either all surveyed systems or a single system. It would be awesome if you could select a system, like Sol, and search for e.g. Duaranium in systems one jump away from Sol or two jumps away from Sol. Would be really helpful when establishing colonies in deep space, and you want to ensure access to all minerals within a reasonable distance.

Well distance is not measured in number of jumps but in billions of km, so it would be better to be able to sort on that instead IMHO.

Another interesting metric that would be useful is to sort only on targets that are Jump Gate connected to your home planet.

[Michael Sandy]

I would like to see options for how many warp points the average system has.

That way, I could play with 90% (or higher) connect to stars in the local cluster, so there will be multiple routes to stars in my cluster, while still having good odds of connections to other clusters.

Also, a real galactic map, where you can see what your empire looks like in real space would be fun, especially if clustering is based on distance in real space.  So you could guess what stars it would be worth surveying to find a backdoor into an enemy empire, or for that matter, which to avoid if you wanted to avoid them.

Possibly have the galactic map be a researchable tech, with each new system discovered adding research points to the tech.

[iceball3]

Organising your salvos isn't too hard. In large battles, though, it can get difficult to make sense of what you've actually done to your enemy's ships. I'd like it if the game tracked exactly how much of your ordnance (maybe even down to numbers of specific missile types and their warhead values) that an enemy contact has been hit with and how much energy weapons fire (in damage points) that it has received.  It'd be great if, ontop of this, your intelligence information included a statistic for each enemy ship type's "average damage before kill" that becomes more precise as you kill more of them.

This is an amazing idea, yeah.
Worth noting, though, that Average Damage To Kill might be anywhere to extremely random, to extremely weapon profile dependant. I.E., thin skinned ship getting hit by large penetration weapons, vs same ship getting sandblasted apart by gauss or railguns. This is mainly due to ships not necessarily having a distinct HTK, as the HTK number for ships is actually the cumulative HTK of all internal components, and not actually directly deterministic of how fast it'll die to internal damage (for instance, 10HTK 1HS magazines won't contribute much to the ability of the ship to not die.)

[Steve Walmsley]

Organising your salvos isn't too hard. In large battles, though, it can get difficult to make sense of what you've actually done to your enemy's ships. I'd like it if the game tracked exactly how much of your ordnance (maybe even down to numbers of specific missile types and their warhead values) that an enemy contact has been hit with and how much energy weapons fire (in damage points) that it has received.  It'd be great if, ontop of this, your intelligence information included a statistic for each enemy ship type's "average damage before kill" that becomes more precise as you kill more of them.

This actually already exists in the game. It is tracked by NPRs . They monitor how much damage is needed to kill each ship class. It would be simple enough to add this to the intelligence window. However, I'd never got around to modifying the NPR missile allocation code to take advantage of this information. It isn't very straightforward as you also need some idea of defensive capability before assigning targets.

[Steve Walmsley]

World gen setting that lets you force all or a percentage of RNG-spawned NPRs to be Human.

I will be adding something on these lines for C# Aurora. The first large campaign I have in mind (once properly tested) is the Great Crusade from WH40K, so I will need a proportion of NPRs to be human.

[Steve Walmsley]

If you have 'collected' enough PoWs, you could release them as a separate colony.

Espionage Teams are actually killed when discovered. Would love to have a chance of capturing them which can provide some opportunities for RP (something along the line of 'Bridge of Spies')... .

They can be captured. If they are, the enemy gains some intelligence.

[Steve Walmsley]

Doublepost for full suggestion:
Rather than have NPR units ignore fuel costs, how about instead having them use fuel, as normal, but rather than stopping on no fuel, they will instead run at 1/3rd speed for commercial, 2/3rd speed for military. When they run out of fuel in this state, they will continue doing what they're doing, but queue up refueling at next convenience, with a bit of extra priority.
When they go to refuel, they will have a stored amount of "fuel used below 0", an amount that will instantly be deleted from the colony in question (resetting the "fuel used below 0" value), before adding fuel directly to the tank of the ship.

This'll basically make it so that NPRs are at least penalized for operating far outside of their spheres of influence without having some attackable logistics line to show for it.

I will look at NPRs tracking fuel state correctly for C# Aurora. With much faster code execution, I can add a lot more intelligence to the NPRs.

[ChildServices]

This is an amazing idea, yeah.
Worth noting, though, that Average Damage To Kill might be anywhere to extremely random, to extremely weapon profile dependant. I.E., thin skinned ship getting hit by large penetration weapons, vs same ship getting sandblasted apart by gauss or railguns. This is mainly due to ships not necessarily having a distinct HTK, as the HTK number for ships is actually the cumulative HTK of all internal components, and not actually directly deterministic of how fast it'll die to internal damage (for instance, 10HTK 1HS magazines won't contribute much to the ability of the ship to not die.)

Could always only track "ADTK" based upon the last however many kills, or filter away all kills before a certain date.

Another option is to create an algorithm that filters away outliers such as you killing a ship using 500 AMMs out of desperation when you'd killed every other ship in its class in that battle with only 4 or 5 torpedoes (less raw damage overall, but more penetration), or the inverse of that where you get lucky and an enemy ship fails a bunch of damage allocation rolls and dies from only one torpedo. This is the much more "high effort" solution to the problem you mentioned as far as the coding work required, though.

Edit: A crazy third option I've come up with is to track "composite" kills with the same types of weapons, I.E if I hit it with both torpedoes and AMMs, then give me an average of how many torpedoes + AMMs (of the exact types used, or based solely upon warhead values of missiles used) that it takes on average to kill one based on the averages of all kills where those were the only two weapons used (possibly filtering away other things which did barely any damage into an "other sources" category). The information you'd get out of this would be pretty damn hard to read, because each ship would have several ADTK scores, but it would still ultimately be useful for planning purposes.